English version

19th-25th January

I wasn't sure what I was expecting - a hazard of gathering ebooks sometimes - but Flint soon drew me into this humorous fantasy story. I was much disgruntled and disappointed by a viewpoint switch, which took me from an entrancingly novel protagonist to a deeply verbose and rather tiresome character. While this is deliberate and for comic effect, I felt like it was overdone and the story was becoming dull. Luckily, from the next switch vim and vigour returned, and never left again. Flint's writing here resembled my old favourite Craig Shaw Gardner, but while CSG produces pure slapstick farce, Flint offers something less overtly ludicrous. I was grinning through most of my read, and even laughed out loud not a few times. Praise indeed. I hope he'll get round to producing a sequel.

This is the manual for a roleplaying game. It's a huge book, and RPGs don't lend themselves to the usual literary analysis. In this case, my opinion of it as a game is rather split. On the one hand, I'm intrigued by this game and its world, both from reading it and from my other exposure to it. On the other hand, I really don't feel I could confidently run a game in this system, because I don't have a holistic grasp of the world. The main reason for the book's size is that Cook has included a sprawling gazetteer of the world, covering in detail dozens of cities, towns, mountains, ruins, forests and their inhabitants. Although reading through the details got rather dry (in fairness, it's not a novel, it's a roleplaying tool), most of it was creative and full of attractive strangeness. The problem is that the very strangeness and disjointedness that Cook emphasises makes it nigh-impossible for me to think how I'd fill in the blanks between, let alone come up with my own content. I now realise that including all that detail wasn't just the urge to get his creation down on paper, but a bit of a necessity.

A simple, pleasant set of four stories. Hawthorne's style is definitely out of fashion now, verbose and rather sentimental, but although these now seem quite dated, I found they worked well for these stories. They're simple, almost humble stories, all based loosely on some real thing or event. I don't think I'd want to read a lot of his work, as it feels simplistic and the style now grates a bit, but these were fine.

English version

12th-18th January

An unexpectedly good and entertaining reader. The collection is well-judged, simple and a familiar genre, but still flavourful. It presents the text in three formats: Japanese with notes, Japanese only, and English gloss. I found the annotated version was enough to check the odd word or expression, then read the plain Japanese for practice, and only used the English to confirm once I'd read each story. The annotations were clear and helpful.

A fun and varied collection of stories. They're generally light in tone, but range from cute little bits of fun to improving tales or mini-adventures. Some tickled me more than others, but it was all good stuff.

Afterword

I read 3 books, I began the week with 153, so 151 are left over. Not really up to scratch - I need to be reading three a week.

English version

5th-11th of January

A book of knightly derring-do and so forth, written in the 13th century. It's part of the Grail cycle of Arthurian stories, and having heard of it I was interested to get another perspective. Sadly I have to confess I gave up before the end of the first chapter. It's translated from Middle High German, and I found it a pretty rough read. Perhaps they wanted to retain some of the structure and flavour of the original, which is usually praiseworthy, but the attempt doesn't do much for me. I found Wolfram's voice completely inconsistent, veering from high-falutin' poetical to earthy within a paragraph, or even a sentence. I simply couldn't settle into it.

Also, as you might know from similar stories, they love to cram in the details. Loving descriptions of journeys, recitations of names, and several sentences describing some item present at some event which will itself take pages to describe... it's too much for me. Shades of 1 Kings, if you know what I mean - all so many cubits and such-and-such wood.

It's supposed to be a good story, but I couldn't cope with this translation. Maybe another time.

I liked the premise of this book: the wizard Nita (from two previous books) is sent to Ireland to spend the summer with her aunt. The story itself is fine: well written, smooth and eventful. I also enjoyed the character interactions, as Duane depicts an array of interesting characters with few or many brushstrokes as required. That being said, a couple of things niggled at me.

Early in the story, a young man questions why the Powers (God, probably) sent Nita. Why couldn't the local wizards handle whatever was going on? And I have to say that I don't feel like the book really provided a compelling answer to that question. She plays a very low-key role in this story, supporting the actions of a whole gang of adult wizards. She does unravel a few puzzles and helps out, but it mostly seems to involve being in the right place at the right time. I can't recall any instance where some specific ability or knowledge of Nita's is the key. Her younger sister Dairine is vital, but a) that doesn't justify Nita, and b) she's vital in a rather tangential way. This isn't a huge flaw in the book, but I do think this question weakens the story somewhat.

The second isn't particular to this book, but an example of a trend I've started to notice in urban fantasy. There seems to be a tendency to assign Ireland and all things Irish (if they are discussed at all) to a particular box, which is the Most Mystical Country. Ireland tends to be the place with most 'residual magic' or whatever. Its history is very dominant, its boundaries between walls thin. Strange occurrences are common, mythological creatures relatively widespread, and the Irish themselves typically blasé about this through a mixture of wide credulity, affability and being inured to weirdness. The Irish language may be connected to the Magical Speech, and is often used to give extra weight to the mystical elements; fey usually speak Irish. This sort of thing isn't just my reading, but explicitly stated in the text.

While this sounds pretty cool, I think a result of this being common is that Ireland tends to be exoticised. Its canonical place as wondrous historical fairyland implies that other countries are the norm. Ireland is the outsider, the strange thing, the other. The weight given to it also tends to mean that other, more commonplace features of Ireland (and Irish, and Irish characters) are sidelined. Do not all countries have their own mythological backgrounds, just like Ireland, and their own languages? I have never seen Holland presented as a mystical place, Spanish as a tongue inherently connected to magic, the English as inured to the supernatural events so unusually common in their homeland. Germans do not have the second sight, Poles don't seem to be innately sensitive to psychic events.

I'm finding it quite hard to articulate (or pin down) what it is I'm trying to say, because I really don't know enough about these topics. It feels like Ireland in fantasy tends to be put in a box, and it's always a very similar box, and while it's a pretty flattering box in many ways, fundamentally it still doesn't leave much room to grow and breathe.

A nice short, engagingly-illustrated piece about the sea and its relationship to us, putting some things in perspective. Touches of humour leaven the facts. It's only 8 pages, all hand-painted; give it a look.

Afterword

Not the best start... this week I realised I'd omitted 15 ebooks from the list (I've always been a bit wishy-washy about whether ebooks count as 'to read'). This means I actually began with 159 books, and last week 156 were left.

English version

This book always comes up when talking about weird fiction, fantasy or Lovecraft, so I wanted to try it. It's a decent read, but the stories vary considerably in genre, and I personally found the mix of weird tales and moody historical vignettes rather dissatisfying.

The first four are deeply weird stories. They combine alternative history, a very sinister supernatural, and lyrical writing, with excellent results. All are macabre and intriguing.

The Repairer of Reputations is a really effective tale of the unreliable narrator, which paints a fascinating and alarming picture of madness. It's not until right at the end that you can begin to unravel the complex delusions that intertwine, and find the very foundations of the story are shifting sand. This is already one of my favourite weird tales.

The titular (fictional) play The King in Yellow features in The Yellow Sign. It's actually not such a strange story, essentially a new twist on the supernatural curse. However, it's very well-executed, with compelling writing that really sells the repulsiveness of the watchman, and the dogged thoughts that will not leave our protagonist alone. I confess, though, that all the build-up this story has elsewhere had led me to expect a far weirder tale. The Court of the Dragon, The Mask and The Damoiselle d'Ys are less striking, though all of them are solid supernatural tales. There's a little flavour of the weird to Court, which I liked a great deal, and all are well-written and drew me along easily.

Beyond this, the collection moves into essentially historical writing. The stories retain the underlying grim notes of the early tales; one is about Paris under siege, the others about life in poor Bohemian artists' quarters. The writing remains good, but having come for weirdness I found little to appeal in these. They felt like style over substance, for very little seemed to happen, either in plot or in character development. That being said, they do evoke their atmosphere very effectively.

The art in this book is great; clear, crisp, an evocative mixture of realism and impressionistic touches. Perhaps not quite as much to my taste as Obata Takeshi’s work, but very solid. He reskins some scenes to depict emotion, such as painting Fushimi's first encounter with an editor as a boxing match.

The story was, for a Japanese learner, a little harder to follow. It seems to be along the same lines as the excellent Bakuman, following a would-be manga artist’s struggles. Unlike the artistic duo in Bakuman, our hero Fushimi meets with blunt rejection on his first attempt, which is a bit more convincing.

However, this story features a second plot that initially seems entirely separate, featuring what’s presumably our heroine Rin. I confess that I was initially completely baffled by this thread. As far as I could tell, she was ambivalent about possibly becoming a model, or some such thing? I was assuming this would be a mundane story about ordinary people. I worked out only in the last few pages that Rin is, in fact, some kind of psychic or medium, who can see ghosts and/or the future and past. Having worked this out, the story makes a lot more sense. To a fluent reader it should be pretty straightforward, though!

I liked the interactions between characters here. Awkward maybe-flirting teenagers, close friends, bored professionals, would-be agents, I thought they were all pretty convincing.

I’d call this a solid book, with characters I’m happy to follow and a reasonably compelling story, despite my confusion over what that story actually is. I confess that I’m actually *less* interested in the story now that I know it’s got psychics in it, but I’m odd like that, and I’m still pretty interested.

So apparently I completely forgot to include an English translation when I first wrote this post! Oops...

This is a fun school-themed manga - yes, I know, that's most manga to be honest... Sakamoto (the titular protagonist, if you can't read Japanese) is a paragon of students: brilliant, athletic, brave, and capable in any task. You could imagine that this will make for a dull story, which is quite often the case with stories about implausibly skilled protagonists who just end up as Mary Sues. In this case, it didn't bother me at all. It feels to me as though Sakamoto is more of a force of nature than a protagonist here; rather, each chapter has its own protagonist, someone whose life is affected by Sakamoto. Although he is well-known, well-respected and admired by lots of girls, somehow Sakamoto evaded being a Mary Sue, perhaps because the text refuses to make it all about him. I really enjoyed this book - the Japanese was quite difficult for me, since it seems to be very colloquial and teenaged, but it was clear enough mostly.

Afterword

I read 3 books, I began with 144, so 141 are left over. 頑張って！

Correction: I read 3 books, I began with 159, so 156 are left over. 頑張って！

Australian gothic : an anthology of Australian supernatural fiction, 1867-1939

Doig, James

Australian hauntings : colonial supernatural fiction

Doig, James

Stealing the Elf-King's roses

Duane, Diane

A wizard abroad

Duane, Diane

A Wizard Of Mars

Duane, Diane

The wizard's dilemma

Duane, Diane

Wizards at war

Duane, Diane

Forward the mage

Flint, Eric

Structures : or why things don't fall down

Gordon, J. E.

Unnatural history

Green, Jonathan

The gorgon's head

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

The Great Stone Face

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Kwaidan: stories and studies of strange things

Hearn, Lafcadio

Morlock Night (Angry Robot)

Jeter, K.W.

This is how fucking scary the ocean is

Webber, Colleen

A man of means

Wodehouse, P. G.

A plague of demons and other stories

Laumer, Keith

A prefect's uncle

Wodehouse, P. G.

A Prisoner in Fairyland ...

Blackwood, A.

A wizard alone

Duane, Diane

Aborigine : myths and legends

Smith, W. Ramsay

An introduction to Elvish : and to other tongues and proper names and writing systems of the third age of the Western Lands of Middle-Earth as set forth in the published writings of Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

English version

A new year begins. I've already admitted that I have a problem of book over-abundance. Again. Pants.

Ebooks are causing complications, but I reckon I currrently have 144 unread books. As many of them are still on boats in the middle of the Pacific, or exist only as data (and the rest are currently jammed into boxes crammed into cupboards and I don't have room to unpack everything just for something like this) I can't actually make them into a huge pile, as I unwisely did in 2013. It's probably for the best.

Quite a few are in foreign languages or very technical. I've left out a couple in languages I don't actually speak - presents, let me add! Bearing in mind health issues, other things to do, and an unquenchable urge to buy more books... I'm aiming to cut the pile down to 50 books by this time next year. Ouch.

Hey, here's a list for you:

Australian gothic : an anthology of Australian supernatural fiction, 1867-1939

Doig, James

Australian hauntings : colonial supernatural fiction

Doig, James

Stealing the Elf-King's roses

Duane, Diane

A wizard abroad

Duane, Diane

A Wizard Of Mars

Duane, Diane

The wizard's dilemma

Duane, Diane

Wizards at war

Duane, Diane

Forward the mage

Flint, Eric

Structures : or why things don't fall down

Gordon, J. E.

Unnatural history

Green, Jonathan

The gorgon's head

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

The Great Stone Face

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Kwaidan: stories and studies of strange things

Hearn, Lafcadio

Morlock Night (Angry Robot)

Jeter, K.W.

This is how fucking scary the ocean is

Webber, Colleen

A man of means

Wodehouse, P. G.

A plague of demons and other stories

Laumer, Keith

A prefect's uncle

Wodehouse, P. G.

A Prisoner in Fairyland ...

Blackwood, A.

A wizard alone

Duane, Diane

Aborigine : myths and legends

Smith, W. Ramsay

An introduction to Elvish : and to other tongues and proper names and writing systems of the third age of the Western Lands of Middle-Earth as set forth in the published writings of Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien